Time for an admission from Kilian Doyle.
You recall last week I foresaw an Ireland of the future that was covered in concentric rings of road around Dublin due to our Great Leaders' addiction to roads?
The idea wasn't entirely my own. I hold my hands up. 'Twas inspired by a notion from the great man himself, Brian O'Nolan aka Myles na Gopaleen aka Flann O'Brien aka any of the many other names he availed of during his all-too-short life.
I make no secret of my admiration - nay, idolatry - of the man and his work. A cantankerous aul' sod with a tongue and turn of phrase so sharp he could whip even the most egotistical and pompous of targets into quivering, simpering gobdaws without even trying. Lob into the pot the most surreal and mischievous and downright jaw-crackingly funny wit ever to grace the pages of this or any other newspaper and you have the man himself. What's not to like?
Flann is perhaps most famous for the postulation that persistent cyclists are part-bicycle, and their bicycles part-human, due to the atomic transference caused by the friction between buttock and saddle. A recidivist cyclist myself, I'm around 89 per cent short-tempered, supercilious, smug, self-serving sniveller.
But we're approaching the end of a long winter and cycling has been an unattractive proposition at the best of times. Nonetheless, there's still a substantial hint of bike about me. You can see it when I lift the soles of my feet - there's black rubber there instead of skin. And I'm oft to be found propping myself up by one elbow in the hall. Let's say six and a half per cent.
Inclemency means I've deigned to use the bus on occasion. Inevitably, a certain element of "busness" has seeped through the seat of my pants - I'd vouch for half a percentage point. There's the Luas, too . . . I've been on that, but I didn't touch anything and the rubber feet prevented any atomic transfer. So it doesn't count.
Finally, there's the small matter of the remaining four per cent, which is made up of elderly Bavarian particles. But I digress . . .
Myles was remarkably prescient. He wrote in the 1940s that there are two acceptable attitudes to roads - either there aren't enough and more should be built, or they should be all dug up and the whole country sown with wheat.
The second attitude is long past even contemplating, thanks to the concretisation of the Emerald Isle in the decades since he wrote. It would be like trying to give a freakishly hirsute gorilla a full-body waxing.
So to the first. Engineers, he claims, explained to him the best way to build a road is to build it beside an old one. It's to do with logistics, you see - the existing road is ideal for transporting the necessary road-building machinery. Once the second road is completed, it can in turn be used as a similar platform for the third, and so on. "Thus there is no considerable engineering difficulty in constructing an indefinite number of new roads provided they are located parallel and together," he wrote.
I invite anyone who scoffs at the very idea anyone could use this theory as a blueprint for modern road construction to drive along the old road through the Curragh and admire the motorway alongside you. I'm sure readers around this fair land will be able to point out many other examples of pointless parallel paving.
And then there's the M50. And its mooted elder sibling, the M51. Which will, in turn, be followed by the M52. And on and on in semi-circles around Dublin ad infinitum.
Can someone answer me this - did someone in the NRA stumble across Myles' humble article and think it the Definitive Guide to Road Planning? Perhaps they should be set straight?